On 4/3/06, Jane Jordan (gmail) <juanitatighan at gmail.com> wrote: > Oh, my. It seems really confusing. I see a *whole* lot of stuff. > Not even sure where to start. Oh well. This is not something I will > be able to just dive in, I think. > > Jane I did warn you about the learning curve... To give you a flavour of what Latex can do, here are the template files for reseach papers published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It's designed to have 3 columns of author details, followed by a title and a two column body with sections for Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, References etc. It demonstrates layout of maths formulae if you're interested in that sort of thing. It also automatically places a copyright notice in the bottom left corner of page 1. The page is formatted for US Letter. There are 3 files. The first is the latex file you would write or modify. The second is a configuration file. The third is the generated PDF (though I doubt it's "accessible PDF"). I chose the example to show the best and worst aspects of Latex. It shows the power and flexibility of the tool on a very complex layout. It also shows how scary it can be if you try. For "normal work", its much simpler really. Also, few people ever have to create that CLS file, there are pre-written files on the web that do almost anything you might want. This one was created by the ACM for their authors. http://www.w4a.info/2006/backingfiles/sig-alternate.tex http://www.w4a.info/2006/backingfiles/sig-alternate.cls http://www.w4a.info/2006/backingfiles/sig-alternate.pdf Bob Dodd Accessibility Research Centre University of Teesside United Kingdom
